Sure. Yet let me say that, pragmatically yours, I can't think of any
insitutions of such size being configured differently, looking at the
place where we live, InI call it Babylon.

yeah, for sure...

You'll find me side by side with all those protesting against the
overwhelming presence of the military-industrial complex, we should
even join forces planning something else out of the hashes of
post-modernism, yet I can't avoid thinking that the very medium that
puts us in contact (and the best example of Deleuze and Guattari's
rhizome) comes from there, via a monopolization of research funds
indeed: and this situation looks like growing, not diminishing.

what I have experienced (from the start of life, literally, spending the second
6 weeks of life transiting the AlCan Highway from Strategic Air Command HQ in
Anchorage Alaska, across Canada & the US to the Pentagon in DC) is that the
military-industrial complex continually generates a (technological)
contingencies, a good historical example being the interstate highway system.
(It's a bit simplistic an example, but I believe it illustrates the general
principle.) The primary purpose of the highway system was/is to deploy men and
material around the continent and facilitate whatever else needs to happen to
support those deployments. The net result is that communities, families, and
relationships are shattered en mass across the entire social system as 'men' can
be moved around great distances much easier than before (when it took Ike
Eisenhower 7 weeks to move a battalion from coast to coast around WWI). Of
course the highway system is sold to the taxpayers as a marvelous technological
innovation (thank you, Hitler's autobahn system) that brings FREEDOM! The
shattered social structure then is partially patched together with a
house-to-house centrally-deployed telecom network "the next best thing to being
there." and there is only praise and happiness for the telecom network, as every
one has not clearly understood that the MIC concept of freedom means only that
the 'system' is free to utilize participants in the social system as much as it
can (taxation, finance control and profit, consumerism, industrial control of
the production of food, etc, etc)...

So in the Light of this example, it is easy to see why we are all so enamored of
the Darpa Net that has us in its sway, we are feeling like it brings us a little
bit more community than we have had before it came along. And the crucial
question becomes, where did the paucity of relation come from that we were
subject to before? When that is identified, the principle of 'progress' and
'development' may be seen for what it is -- a means of happily enslaving the
whole lot of humanity to a Master of its own making (and in its own image).

So I won't praise MIT for open courseware, but I respect the concerns
of those operators that let their (well funded) research be free and
accessible, because these are also the grounds on which I base my own
criticism of technology - one could still argue that those of us
focusing on technology might deserve ethernal damnation :)

hehe, it is the plight of human incarnation in Babylon that puts us in the
imperfect technology of body, and that body then utilized (distorts) existing
flows of energy around it to to ensure its procreative activities. Its only a
sliding scale, where each technology is placed. The concept is the same, so the
process of carving a wooden harrow and harnessing it to a beast of burden can
wreak havoc on the community of critters there in the cultivated soil only
differs by degree from driving a 1.5-million-dollar John Deere harvester across
a thousand acres of Monsanto-gen-x wheat in a day. Life distorts the flows that
it is immersed in.

Said that, InI feel grateful for reminding us that another World is
possible.

But if you know what life is worth,
You will look for yours on earth ;-)

as long as we have some Other(s) to encounter and interact with, regardless of
the technological intermediation, we can still be inspired and electrified and
moved to a higher level of be-ing...